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Daily Dispatch

10 Tips: Why I Love Publishing to SlideShare

What’s not to like about a large, highly targeted B2B market with low competition? Not much. That’s why SlideShare has become the Internet’s largest platform for sharing presentations. With 60 million unique visitors every month, it receives five times more traffic from business owners than any other platform of its kind. What’s more, built-in sharing tools let you easily post to your social media accounts.

But tapping into the SlideShare audience requires more than simply posting your live presentation deck. It is a publishing platform, not a posting repository. To be effective, your slide deck should be focused, visual and informative, tailored for SlideShare viewing.

10 Tips for Converting Your Presentation to SlideShare

A presentation with too many words and too many ideas will fail just as quickly as a deck without a narrative to explain the information. Your deck needs to connect the dots for your audience, making things ultra clear, while being memorable and valuable.

2. Title Page. Choose an eye-catching, colorful image for your presentation’s first page and write a really great title. Make it compelling and searchable — include keywords. The title and image should be large enough and simple enough to be readable in tiny thumbnail format. Include your logo on the first and last slides, but don’t clutter the other slides’ content with it. (Use your second slide for your disclaimer, and add a nice background image.)

3. TOC. Include a table of contents as your third slide to make consumption easy. Mapping out where your presentation is headed provides your audience with a path and purpose.

4. Slides. Stick to this rule: ONE IDEA PER SLIDE. When tempted to put more than one idea on a slide, just say no. Instead, break your ideas into smaller chunks of information. Your presentation will be more memorable. If the point needs further explanation, follow with a separate text-only slide or link to a deeper discussion on your blog or to a website article. Avoid outdated clip art. Charts and graphs work.

5. Links. Excellent search engine optimization (SEO) is built into SlideShare, but you should supplement this by adding links within your content. For example, add a “Further Reading” slide with links to your other decks or website content near the end of your presentation.

6. Hashtags. Each SlideShare upload is allowed up to 20 #hashtags. Use them! Search SlideShare for ideas (to ensure your content is not being misunderstood) or try the free tool SEO Chat.

7. Timing. Make use of events such as tax day, holidays and elections.

8. CTA. Every deck should include a call to action. It can be subtle (i.e., “contact me for more information”) or more overt (see below).

10. Promote. Use the built-in, one-click sharing tools to post to your social media accounts — LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook — and embed the deck in your website or blog. Upload frequently. Users tend to look for more goodies from an author they like!

Slideshows Are a Visual Platform

Slideshows are visual tools. Without eye-appealing design and a clear presentation format, all of your good information has the potential to be skipped (or misunderstood). PowerPoint is not your only option. A free cloud-based option I like is Haiku Deck (mobile and desktop applications). It makes your job super easy with its limited choices and intuitive interface. You can transform a mundane presentation into a visual delight in just 30 minutes — no kidding. You will get a professional-looking presentation without any heavy lifting.

Jayne Navarre is an early adopter of social media and content marketing strategy and tactics for law firms and lawyers. Skilled at sorting and analyzing the hype, conflicting information and diverse opinion about social media for business communications, she wrote the groundbreaking book Social.Lawyers: Transforming Business Development (West, 2010). At Jayne Navarre + Assoc. she provides marketing expertise, content development and publishing solutions for law firms and lawyers. She blogs atVirtualMarketingOfficerand you can follow her on Twitter @JayneNavarre.

Coming Soon: A Lawyer’s Guide to Social Media Marketing

64 percent of Attorney at Work readers say social media is part of their marketing strategy. SlideShare is only one way to use social media in your online marketing. Watch Attorney at Work next week for a free downloadable e-zine full of tips and tricks for your marketing — and results of our reader survey.